Look Who it Was Random video

Michael Chapman - Directing (81/94)

215 views · Published 12 July 2017 · 2:10 · Indexed 8 November 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Film & Animation

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Michael Chapman (1935-2020) was an innovative cinematographer. He worked with a number of acclaimed directors including Martin Scorsese with whom he created his two best-known films, 'Taxi Driver' and 'Raging Bull'. [Listener: Glen Ade Brown; date recorded: 2004]

TRANSCRIPT: It's not... it's not fun. A lot of directing is not fun, a lot of it. Oh God! But, fortunately, I did a very bad job on 'Clan of the Cave Bear', so I was spared having to do it much anymore. I did... I directed a TV pilot and I directed... sometime later I directed a Viking movie in Iceland, which was also a fiasco, but not entirely my fault that time. That was partly a matter of casting and things. But it was fun to go to Iceland, and I don't... and I don't regret that at all. It was great fun to go to Iceland, and it was also a low budget, you know... off the book sort of movie anyway. So it was never... my failure was never even seen. And Iceland was fascinating.

[GAB] Is this something that you wanted to pursue as a... as a career?

No, no.

[GAB] Because there's a ten year gap between one job and another job.

I didn't... I realized how... how sticky a sort of job it was and how much I didn't need that part of it in my life, and I felt... after I realized what I had really been meaning to say in 'All the Right Moves' I felt, and still do feel, that... although, please God, may it pass me by if I ever again... never again, at my age, but I felt that if you had some subject matter which you really deeply wanted to talk about and get out before the public – whatever it is, you know, be it a political or a social or a sexual... whatever personal... whatever it was that you wanted deeply to say that you cared about – then I would go through it again. But short of that, just as a job... whew, God, I really... I mean, I think as I said earlier, I had found many years ago that whatever my needs were to express myself... oh God, help me, whatever those things are, I did it plenty good enough as a cameraman and I didn't need that. And so, yes, until... I mean, until I got too old, yes, I would've done something else, had I really felt strongly about it. And I did feel strongly about the Iceland movie because I felt, and do feel still, very strongly about the original source material, 'the Iceland Sagas'. 'The Iceland Sagas' are extraordinary.

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